HE WRITES:
Hi Jeremy,
I have just started reading, Dreams of Awakening: Lucid Dreaming and Mindfulness of Dream and Sleep, by Charlie Morley and in it was the following passage…
…Albert Einstein once wrote, ‘A human being… experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness… To try to overcome this delusion is the way to attain true peace of mind.’ Through lucid dreaming we can overcome this delusion as we experience a fully realistic ‘reality’ which may seem separate from us, but which we know we are dreaming into existence and is actually within us. Thus we are introduced, in visceral fashion, to the radical notion that duality may be a delusion. In a lucid dream we are one with everything, because we are everything. This experience can help dissolve our sense of isolation in the waking state, allowing us finally to wake up to the Oneness on which Einstein and the mystics of the ages have been so eloquent.
I thought the highlighted phrase (In a lucid dream we are one with everything, because we are everything) was very interesting and reminded me of your ‘I am’ experience…and the sentence that follows “…This experience can help dissolve our sense of isolation in the waking state, allowing us finally to wake up to the Oneness on which Einstein and the mystics of the ages have been so eloquent…” made me wonder whether this might be an alternative approach to help facilitate ‘waking up’ to oneness, after having direct experience of being “aware of awareness” within the lucid dreaming state…with the goal being, as the book suggests, becoming lucid in the waking state too.
I RESPOND:
Apples and oranges, I’m afraid. In a lucid dream all is one–the egoic you, who also knows it is temporary and harmless. Lucid dreaming is within the realm of thought and that whole realm must fall away. You go, you don’t become center.
LET US CONTINUE:
Lucid dreaming is one of the faux oneness lures that thought uses to keep us asleep in thought. Thought wants to remain the head honcho, so it weaves experiences of true oneness into tapestries of imitation within itself (and time). To put it cutely, any prep work, exercise, devotion, or practice for oneness always involves you-ness, which is two-ness. Duality. Time.
Oneness is being, not to be. It is not a future event, it is the always case. Anything to be is a thought trap. When you understand this so deeply, so thoroughly, so inescapably that there is no longer a movement for you to be, one is.
The understanding is the changing. If you haven’t changed, you haven’t understood, even if you’ve comprehended this. That is the fact. And so, if you comprehend all of this without understanding it so thoroughly that you are wiped away by it, look there. Stay there. Ask yourself why that is. See what you’re holding onto—you who say you so don’t want to hold onto anything that you can’t even think of what it would be, so I must be wrong.
We’re clever, very clever, at remaining unchanged in the face of necessary change. Sleeping Einsteins, all.